Harvard Management Company Opens San Francisco Office Amid Shift Toward Tech Investments

Harvard Management Company has opened a satellite office in San Francisco, expanding its physical footprint as the endowment shifts toward technology and venture capital investments concentrated on the West Coast.

The office — HMC’s first domestic satellite location in years — opened within the last year, according to a former HMC employee.

Another former HMC employee also publicly referenced the San Francisco office’s launch. In a LinkedIn post published seven months ago, former executive assistant Tomesha Campbell wrote that she helped support “the kickoff of our San Francisco office,” alongside the firm’s expansion into Singapore.

The move comes amid a broader tilt in HMC’s publicly disclosed portfolio toward Silicon Valley-adjacent sectors. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the endowment opened a new multimillion-dollar position in an Ethereum exchange-traded fund while trimming its Bitcoin holdings. Harvard also boosted its shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, by 25 percent and in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company by 45 percent.

A spokesperson for HMC declined to comment on the new location.

NYU finance professor David L. Yermack ’85 wrote in a statement that the new office is likely tied to HMC’s growing interest in alternative investments on the West Coast.

“This would almost certainly be connected with prospecting for alternative investments in the technology space,” wrote Yermack, a former Crimson managing editor. “The center of that industry is in Palo Alto where all of the major venture capital firms have their headquarters.”

Ye Li, an associate professor of finance at the University of Washington, wrote in a statement that the location was “most likely to gather information on investment opportunities related to AI and other new technologies (including investment via VCs).”

HMC had been working to open the San Francisco location for several years, according to the former employee, who was granted anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.

The office mirrors a model HMC established in 2022, when it opened a satellite location in Singapore — called HMC APAC — to increase access to private and public market investments in the Asia-Pacific region. The San Francisco and Singapore offices are the only known satellite locations currently in operation, though HMC has opened and subsequently closed other outposts in the past.

Greg Buchak, an associate professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, wrote in a statement that while it is standard for university endowments to meet with managers of existing investments, in-person contact is especially important when evaluating new opportunities.

“To the extent that HMC wants to invest in new managers, they would definitely want to meet with them in-person before investing,” Buchak wrote.

HMC, which manages Harvard’s $56.9 billion endowment, allocated 41 percent of its portfolio to private equity in fiscal year 2025, up from 39 percent the year prior. Buchak said the new office suggests the endowment’s appetite for West Coast deals is only growing.

“The endowment has a lot of investments into tech companies/VC funds and perhaps wants to do even more,” Buchak wrote.

—Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at megblon.50. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.